We are FAR FAR MORE than the sad stories we keep telling ourselves. Only after we become sufficiently dissatisfied with "ordinary unhappiness" do we become serious about waking up to who / what we truly are. Awakening is far less exotic & difficult than we assume, and nicely described by Lisa Natoli below, transcribed from the excellent documentary video "Awakening Mind" (link at the bottom of this page).
We CAN wake up from our sad "story of me"! This is how Lisa Natoli experienced it :
“I really just love to teach people how ordinary the experience is to wake up to your true nature and know peace, joy & happiness. Many people think it’s an impossible or out-of-reach goal to know the Self. My purpose as a teacher, just because of my own awakening, has really been to make it very practical, very down to earth. I love to teach people how it’s available to everyone.
Awakening is the recognition of your true nature. It’s the realization of what you really are, which is Consciousness. Consciousness is just one word for many words that people use for Awareness, Life, Love, God, Light, Buddha-nature, Christ-consciousness … It’s like waking up to the recognition that I’m not this body, that I am that which never dies, and that which is never born.
That was a very difficult idea for me. I’ve been on a spiritual path since 1992. I started with ‘A Course in Miracles’ – I studied it religiously. I was so committed to knowing the self, knowing God, waking up. I couldn’t get it because I was under the belief that Awakening was something mystical, that something would happen and it would be like Jesus or Buddha or all of these enlightened Masters and it wasn’t happening for me. I couldn’t understand. Why when I’m so committed, and having deep moments of peace, happiness & joy, and yet I’m still struggling?
The thing that changed for me, it was in October 2018, I started to realize the simplicity of our true nature, which is Awareness. So for someone who’s listening to me right now, the Awareness that’s hearing this voice – that’s what we are. And it doesn’t have a location, it doesn’t have a gender, it doesn’t have a color, it doesn’t have a body, and it’s totally unlimited. At first the mind doesn’t know what to do with that, because it’s that Awareness of our experience that is our true nature. It’s without labels, it’s without patterns, it’s without conditioning, it’s that part of each and every one of us that is just aware. We wake up to the realization that I am the Awareness of this experience, right now as I’m here. And it’s so ordinary that we miss it. We think it can’t be that simple.
And after October 2018, I began to just entertain the idea, because it doesn’t fit into our thought system. It doesn’t fit in a box because we’re so used to thinking it’s going to look a certain way and it’s always going to be in the future.
After that there was a period of really starting to live from the Awareness. And that was life-changing. That changed everything. To begin to see when the person Lisa was showing up, when the habits were showing up, the conditioning, the beliefs, the preferences, the likes, the dislikes. Those all belonged to the person – and they’re not good or bad. But when I began to really stay as the Awareness where I could see all that activity, I could see what Lisa was doing. I could see what was happening. And that’s what an Awakening is. It really is that simple.
And again there are many different ways one can wake up: just in stillness with the eyes closed and being aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations arising, that’s an amazing way to do it. The way I did it was begin to be awake to what I am not. So I was sick with physical symptoms for over 6 years, and I was the sickness – I am sick, I am in pain, these are my physical symptoms, this is when it started, this is what I’m doing to heal it. I didn’t suspect a thing.
So the Awakening for me was to begin to be awake to those patterns, to be awake to when the thought ‘I am sick’ arises, and so to stay as the Awareness of the thought ‘I am sick’ arising. That which is aware, of the thought ‘I’m in pain’ that arises, is my true nature. So now there’s a distance. You’re no longer so identified with (the story of me) ‘I’m sick, I’m in pain, this hurts, I don’t like this, why is this happening, this shouldn’t be happening, this is how it started, this is how I think it started.’ Awakening can happen many different ways, it can happen very spontaneously for some, or be gradual. For me Awakening was a very gradual thing, where there was a distance between the experience of the body and the awareness of the body. And the more that I stayed as the Awareness of the experience, where I no longer identified myself as someone who is sick, I started to more & more abide as the Awareness, as Consciousness, as Love. And all of that (story) just started to disappear. It was no longer my experience. There was no longer identification with that which was happening.
When the world is so full of conflict, and without hope, how does one cope?
My answer to that is, do not cope. It’s the coping that’s the problem. Everyone is coping with the world problems and what it looks like is addiction, social media, etc we’re doing things because we’re trying to cope with the suffering, we’re trying to manage how we feel and bring ourselves out of the discomfort, so we see just a lot of destruction in the world. So coping is actually the one thing you don’t want to do. You do not want to cope, because coping will keep the personal-self identity, makes you feel like you’re out of discomfort but you’re not. So the thing to do is to be aware of the discomfort, and the conflicts, and how you feel, and the thoughts that are coming up about your own life or the world’s, or your relationships, and stay in the discomfort. That’s the opposite of what we’ve been taught in the world, because we’re taught to do things to get out of the discomfort so we can feel better. To solve it, you go and you start eating, drinking, smoking, watch TV, binge on your devices, whatever people do to cope and manage, because they don’t want to feel these emotions, they don’t want to be with them, so we push them down. That’s never worked!
So start welcoming the feeling. Welcome the discomfort. Welcome everything without trying to change anything. That’s the key. You’re not trying to change your overeating, or whatever you’re doing excessively, whatever the addiction is, you’re not doing any of this to change the thing that you’re using as the mechanism for coping. But what happens is that when you stand as Presence in the discomfort, things do fall away, and things do change.
So for me again that was a game-changer, because my whole life was ‘this shouldn’t be happening, I have to do something.’ And I had evidence from the past, where I had maybe lost weight, I had been on a diet and I lost weight, but then I gained it all back again, because I hadn’t gotten to the cause of the problem. I was dealing with the effect. But as soon as I started getting to the cause, which is the personal-self identity, which is the problem, and I just let myself welcome the overweight body, welcome the sickness, welcome the alcoholism, welcome the cigarette smoking, welcome all of those things without trying to change them, one by one things just started falling away. And the paradox is, I didn’t need them to fall away. I wasn’t trying to make them fall away. I would have been happy even if nothing changed. Because the mind will get in there – ‘Oh, we’re doing this technique now so I can lose weight,’ or ‘I’m doing this technique now so I can have a better life.’ So you just want to be aware, ‘Oh that’s the pattern, that’s the personal-self identity.’ This is why I think a teacher is important, because a teacher can really highlight the roadblocks for a moment. You just need a teacher for a moment, to just guide you, who can really shine a light on the path and can see, ‘Oh, I see what’s happening here, no judgment.’ It just makes things much easier and faster. So that would be my answer, ‘Don’t cope.’
What does one need to Awaken?
I think someone who’s interested in these matters, who’s interested in waking up, who’s hearing what’s being said in this documentary, to simply really begin where you are. This is always going to be the spot. It’s not later. Just know that what is in your heart is all that’s needed.
The personal-self identity (self-talk, small self, ego, ordinary mind, left hemisphere dominance) makes it way more complicated. It just thinks ‘I have to do something, I have to go somewhere, I have to pick up another spiritual practice, I have to read something.’
My experience really came from this place of stillness. It’s like that because that call for Awakening is from the Self. It’s coming from the Self. It’s coming from Consciousness. It’s calling us back, because we tend to look outside of ourself for happiness, peace & joy. It’s been calling us back forever. Every single thing in life is trying to get our attention, for us to turn our attention from the external to within. And you later discover there is no external and there is no within (- it's all One).
But that’s the starting place, when you really can say, ‘I want this.’ ‘I don’t know how to get there, I don’t know the journey, I don’t know what it’s going to look like, I’m scared.’
Most people when they hear these ideas, there’s a tremendous amount of fear that comes up, because somewhere deep inside, each and every one of us, we know this is going to change our lives. We know it is probably going to dismantle certain elements of how we live, it could change our relationships, it could change our job, but, that call from the Self is so deep, ‘Yes, let’s go!’ So to me, that’s how someone begins.
If someone is hearing this and they’re listening, and they say, ‘I want to know the Self. I want to experience peace, joy & happiness. I want to stop struggling. Yes, yes, take me there. Show me. Tell me.’ It really does begin right here in this moment with that desire.
For me, it began with that one word, ‘Welcome.’ Welcome everything. Just welcome everything exactly as it is. That’s how it happened for me. Many different people explain it in different ways. They say, ‘All paths lead to God.’ ‘All paths lead to the mountain top.’ Whenever someone is feeling that in their heart, and they’re feeling that call, to me that’s all that’s needed.”
“The Simplicity of Awakening: An Interview with Lisa Natoli” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoV7pw6wiog
For the important CONTEXT, I HIGHLY recommend watching this 67-minute high-quality FREE documentary video "Awakening Mind" Part 1, “Know Thyself” (2023) https://triality.nl/index.php/2024/04/10/awakening-mind-part-1-know-thyself-2023-complete-hd-film/
 |
No comments:
Post a Comment